Kaleidoscope

By committing to join our monthly giving program, you provide Mending Kids with the ability to deliver life-saving surgeries to children, consistently. This matters because dedicated and dependable donors joining forces, like butterflies in a Kaleidoscope, allows us to fly a waiting child from an under served country to where they can receive the specialized pediatric surgical care that they need.

Your contribution allowed Juliana, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, to fly to Tanzania to join Mending Kid's Cardiac Overseas Surgical Mission and received life-saving heart surgery. Your contribution allowed a specialized surgical case to address the maxillofacial needs of Alexandria and other children in Haiti. Your contribution defrays the costs of patients who need to travel to the USA for their operations, such as Anthony from Jamaica or Erik from Honduras; or potentially, the last financing we need to deploy a whole mission to mend many.​The list of variables is endless.​

children are currently on our waiting list to receive operations.We want children to no longer think medical attention is coming; we want children to know Mending Kids is coming. These are individual cases for Mending Kids, meaning, we will not be able to reach these families with a surgical mission. The only way to for these 31 children to receive their critical surgical care is for them to travel from their home to a partner hospital in another country or coordinate to have them brought to the United States.

We share the same blood

​Badru came to Mending Kids' attention through an email request from the Go Foundation in September of 2015. They asked if Mending Kids could help a four-year-old boy from rural Uganda suffering from Tetralogy of Fallot – a heart condition marked by four congenital heart defects. Screened in a rural health clinic by a visiting cardiologist, the little boy with blue lips and clubbing finger tips spent most of his days crouched in a squatting position with little energy to do much else. The prospects of him making it to his fifth or sixth birthday were very slim.​Badru was placed on the patient roster for the cardiac mission that would take place at the Bugando Medical Center in Mwanza, Tanzania the next month. After getting the hospital and both governments to agree to the surgery, the journey to get Badru to Mwanza, Tanzania began.

His mother (who only spoke a Ugandan dialect), a translator/nurse, and a male chaperone traveled with Badru. It took a 12-hour bus ride to Lake Victoria, an overnight ferry to Mwanza, another 2-hour bus ride to the city, and a taxi to the hospital to get Badru to Bugando Medical Center of Tanzania.

​Badru arrived with a fever, which meant he could not be scheduled for surgery until his infection was under control. It was discovered that he had O- blood and 4 units were required for the surgery. A call to the blood bank and Mwanza donors yielded only 2 units.

​As luck would have it, Mending Kids’ Isabelle Fox was also O- and donated an additional unit. With only a one-day window left to operate, Dr. Salvatore Agati and his excellent ancillary team proceeded with the surgery. After a two-week stay in the hospital, Badru and his support team made the long trek home, where he rejoined his five brothers and sisters. At Badru's last follow-up, Badru currently attends second grade and is a very active, happy, and mischievous little boy.

"Mending Kids sent me to do a preliminary site assessment at the Bugando Medical Centre in Tanzania. While there, I met a young boy who was on the ward with a foreign object stuck in his airway and struggling to breathe while local doctors debated on how to treat him.

They did not have the equipment on hand to be able to easily extract the object in a matter of minutes, the parents did not have the funds to send the child to Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar Es Salaam (a 13-hour bus ride from Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria) and they were planning to do a thoracotomy on the boy to extract the object. Given the lack of pediatric nursing care or availability of consumables to manage this extreme surgery, this would surely be a death sentence for him.

Mending Kids resolved to deploy a team to train the local ENT surgeons on extractions and elevate the standards of surgical care when it came to children suffering from a variety of airway problems that affected their breathing and quality of life.”​ - Dr. Lia Jacobson

​"For a decade and a half, Mending Kids has been the #1 most important organization to me and anything you can do goes to significantly increasing the number of children’s lives, that wouldn’t have the opportunity without Mending Kids, to get to have life-changing or lifesaving surgeries. These are brothers, sisters, daughters & sons that get a second chance at life because of this organization and it has also been beautiful to see certain situations as well, where the results go past the medical mission and we see kids have a brighter future and education because of their time with Mending Kids foster families opening up opportunities for broader horizons for their near future and their future families lives. Anything helps and you have my deepest gratitude. "​- Dominic Scott Kay

BE APART OF THEIR monthly JOURNEY

$5/month = Tylenol/ pain medication for one mission

$25/month = Patient's Travel Documents

$50/month = One plane ticket to Central America for a surgical volunteer to save a life

$100/month = One orthopedic surgery for a patient

$250/month = One heart surgery for a patient

Every child deserves a healthy chance at life. A life free of pain, disease, banishment, or bullying. Because of your donation, you make it possible for children to receive the critical surgery they need. You make it possible for children to attend school, to have futures. You reduce suicide rates in children across the world. You remove a parent from experiencing their worst nightmare and free them to rejoin the workforce and contribute to their whole family's welfare and to society. You empower a child to achieve their dreams by not being limited to something that an operation can mend.